I found out late this afternoon (Monday) that my next door neighbor committed suicide sometime between late last night and early this afternoon. As tragic as that is, what made it even worse for me was that I was evidently in my apartment when it happened. I heard people banging on his door repeatedly earlier this afternoon and then, in desperation crying out, "If you don't open the door in ten seconds, we're coming in."

 

Even though I'm a former policeman, suicide was the furthest thing from my mind when I heard that. I thought it was maybe a domestic dispute or an angry friend and thought nothing else about it until I left my apartment several hours later and saw two police cars parked in our parking lot. A few minutes later, my good friend Daryl Bonow, who lives in the same complex, called and told me what had happened.

 

Tragically, even though the person who died was my next door neighbor, I didn't know him. In fact, I had never met him. That's a pretty common thing in today's world that used to be pretty rare. I grew up in a town of three thousand people where everyone knew everyone else. I know that many of you continue to lead the same kind of lives I did when I was growing up but there's also a part of the world that doesn't do that anymore and today I happen to live in that part of the world.

 

The summer of 2001 was one of the happiest periods of my life but, at the same time, on a different level, it was one of the most troublesome. I was in a wonderful relationship with a truly awesome person, but I wasn't for sure where the relationship was going to end up. Something was supposed to happen in August that would have changed our lives forever, but I wasn't convinced it was going to work out as planned and it was going to be several days before I found out. This caused me a tremendous amount of anxiety, since what was going to happen or not happen was totally beyond my control, so I did something I never thought I would do. I went to a doctor for help. After a thorough physical examination and a long question and answer session, I was diagnosed with clinical depression and was prescribed Effexor, an anti-depressant medication.

 

Clinical depression is a medically diagnosed condition that involves a state of intense sadness, melancholia or despair that has advanced to the point of being disruptive to a person's social functioning and/or activities of daily living. A clinically depressed person often feels sad, tired, irritable, lazy, unmotivated, unproductive and apathetic. I certainly experienced all of those symptoms individually and, occasionally, all of them at once. Clinical depression is markedly different from just "feeling" depressed. Most people feel depressed from time to time for one reason or another; usually because of a particular and isolated situation or event they're facing, but their functioning is more or less normal in other areas of their lives. Clinical depression, on the other hand, bores into your soul, takes up residence there and affects every area of your life. It's not a sign of personal weakness, as far too many people believe; it is a medical illness. Some 32 million people in the United States suffer from it which translates to over ten percent of the population. When someone experiences a traumatic event or finds themselves in situations they have absolutely no control over and they believe the rest of their lives depend solely on the decisions made by others, this often leads to depression. When there is an imbalance between the two chemicals in the brain that affect mood, Serotonin and Norepinephrine, combined with a person going through a traumatic event, clinical depression is often the result. Clinical depression is a leading cause of suicide and suicide is the eleventh leading cause of death in the United States, claiming 33,000 lives every year.

 

For some, the anti-depressant medications work and their lives are restored to some semblance of normalcy. For others, they don't. Effexor works for many but it didn't work for me. It made me aggressive, confrontive and hostile and, after six months, I quit taking it and haven't taken anything else since, although the situation that led to my initial diagnosis didn't work out the way I was told it would. In fact, it worked out the way I was afraid it would which led to my seeing a doctor and being diagnosed with clinical depression to begin with. Four months later my emotional state of mind hit rock bottom when my oldest son died. The relationship I was in at the time gave me great aid and comfort in dealing with and going through a grief process no parent should ever have to endure but the relationship itself still had no resolution in sight. Since 2004, even though most of my life is good, the one thing that mattered most to me imploded and that continues to dictate my mood and my outlook every minute of every day.

 

There are people all around us who are trying to deal with the kinds of problems and difficulties that life sometimes confronts them with and practically everyone knows someone that falls into this category. Some of them are open about their situations but most are not because they still see depression as something to be ashamed of and, consequently, they keep it to themselves. The purpose of this column is to shine the light of day on depression and identify it for what it is; an illness rather than a personal failing.

 

Bobby Goldsboro sang about "laughing on the outside while crying on the inside" and Kenny Rogers sang "I pushed my soul in a deep dark hole and then I followed it in. I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in."

 

A lot of people, many you know and some you would never suspect; including friends, neighbors, co-workers, relatives and loved ones, wake up every single day of their lives in a deep dark hole they simply can't dig out of.

 

As a society, we need to do a much better job of saving, helping, understanding, and reaching out to them before they become a statistic too.